Anyone have good trade show project template?

I'm working on building out Wrike templates for our marketing team, and trade shows is one type that will be one of the larger projects. I've never planned trade show exhibiting myself, but I know there's a lot of planning tasks that need to be completed 9 months to a year out. Any suggestions for a template to follow?

We don't do trade shows specifically, but we do a lot of other events! I worked with our Events Specialist to come up with a template that she's been using for a while.

We like to use what we call "empty tasks" (no due date, assignee, etc.) as a way to categorize all the other tasks. This prevents you from creating sub-projects and folders which can get a little messy.

I also recommend that any task that has a HARD deadline be set as a milestone. (Invoices/forms due, actual dates of the show, etc.) I also highly recommend setting dependencies for events in Wrike!

Each event is set up as a project. Anything that has a set start and end date is a project and anything that used to categorize is a folder. Then, the empty tasks serve to organize the tasks even more! So all tasks that have to do with communicating with our team will go under TEAM COMMUNICATION, all tasks related to supplies under SUPPLIES, and so on.

You might also have a task here for packing up all the supplies!

The reason we do it this way is because events have SO many tasks and different components. If you're looking at everything in a huge, unorganized list, it gets really overwhelming fast! You can also break this down even further into phases: Pre-Event, Event, and Post-Event. That way, you know what you need to do before, the day of/during, and after.

My best advice for creating a template is outlining ALL of the tasks you might need. This helps you cover all your bases and make sure you're not missing anything. For example, we ALWAYS have to send out a staff email to get volunteers for community events. But we might not always have to gather donations. We'd set both up as tasks in the template and review it to delete things we don't need for this particular event.